Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Food is the new battleground for makers of documentaries , but the end results don't always go to plan, reports Bee Wilson. A cattle stun gun is the weapon of choice for Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, and the sight of Bardem's pudding-bowled psychopath killing people at close range is one of the scariest things cinema has had to offer so far this year.
But it's not half as scary as a new documentary about food, Our Daily Bread, in which ordinary, non-psychopathic men put a cattle stun gun to the mundane purpose it was intended - killing cattle.
Our Daily Bread, directed by Austrian Nikolaus Geyrhalter, consists of mostly wordless footage of industrial food production; we see cattle being slaughtered, one by one. A bewildered cow appears inside a metal hatch. A worker in hygienic clothing blasts its head with a stun gun. The animal shudders, stupefied, then flops on to a tray, its legs still slightly shaking, before it is suspended from a giant hook. There is no time to take in the death, never mind mourn it, before the next animal appears.
Our Daily Bread is one of a growing number of food documentaries which are best watched on an empty stomach. The genre took off in 2004 with Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me, followed by Ken Loach's McLibel (2005), Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation (2006) and Mark and Nick Francis's expose of the coffee industry, Black Gold (2006).
Also just released is Sharkwater, about the criminal activities that go into making shark fin soup.
It's a far cry from the 1980s and 90s, which saw a rash of feature films in which food was aspirational and over the top - usually culminating in a giant banquet that changes everyone's lives (Babette's Feast, Stanley Tucci's Big Night, Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet).
The new dystopian food films have arrived partly as a complement to a wave of books about the politics of food - Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Fatland by Greg Critser, Food Politics by Marion Nestle. But films operate more directly, more viscerally, than books, and many of the documentary makers want their films to achieve specific political ends.
Supersize Me had the immediate effect of getting McDonald's to withdraw all Supersize meals from its menu (though they denied this was in response to Spurlock's film). Similarly, director Rob Stewart says that his "sole purpose" in making Sharkwater is to highlight the illegal finning industry.
But there are problems with expecting a film to have a specific outcome, as director Hubert Sauper discovered with Darwin's Nightmare, his Oscar-nominated documentary about the fishing industry in Tanzania. The film showed that while Europeans paid high prices for Nile perch fillets (sometimes flown on planes crammed with weapons), many locals could only afford to eat the discarded skeletons.
Sauper had hoped that his film would improve the lives of those living on the shore of Lake Victoria. In fact, sales of Nile perch plummeted as Western consumers turned away from it, leaving the locals even poorer.
The political impact of these films inevitably depends on how many people they reach. Last year's Black Gold juxtaposed affluent Western consumers chugging huge lattes with the African farmers whose children are starving, and who receive none of the benefits of the world's thirst for coffee.
If there were any justice, the film ought to have resulted in a vast overhaul of the international coffee trade - or at least, a huge rise in Fairtrade sales. "Everyone should see it" reads the blurb on the cover of the DVD. But few people have, and many continue to drink non-Fairtrade lattes.
Should we judge these films according to their political impact or their artistic merit? There's no doubt that Stewart has a remarkable story to tell in Sharkwater. Over a four-year period, he uncovers links between shark finning and mafia corruption. At one point, he is accused of attempted murder, on charges trumped-up by the Costa Rican government.
Then he develops a flesh-eating disease, but he still manages to film some Cousteau-esque underwater footage which provides eloquent proof that sharks are more victims than predators of the human race. The only conclusion seems to be that shark fin soup, a flavourless and overpriced mulch, should be universally banned.
By contrast, it is not clear what message we are meant to take from the remarkable Our Daily Bread, which contains no editorial voice, no proposals as to what should be done. It is a vision of hell and we are in it.
After an hour and a half spent watching the impersonal way our food is now produced, where the only sounds are the hum of machinery and the clucking of battery chickens, you even start to feel sorry for the tomatoes and peppers in their lonely greenhouses.
You lose all desire to eat. Your stomach feels like lead. You long for Javier Bardem to come and put you out of your misery.
NOTE: Sharkwater is now on release. Our Daily Bread is on limited release
